A CULTURE CLUB IN DEEPEST DORSET

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The Crichel Boys Simon Fenwick

Just as World War II ground to its exhausting close, three young men – upper-class, bookish and gay – bought a tumble-down rectory in deepest Dorset. This was the age of austerity, and Long Crichel had no electricity and only a patchy water supply. Nonetheless, over the next few decades ‘the Crichel Boys’ created a ‘happy, brilliant, charming’ atmosphere, according to one of their many famous weekend guests. Luring the artistic great, if not always the good, down from London with drink, good food (there was an excellent cook) and clever chat, the boys welcomed everyone who was anyone, including Nancy Mitford, Vita Sackville-West, above, Benjamin Britten, Peggy Ashcroft, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell and Cecil Beaton.

In this gossipy but scholarly book, Simon Fenwick has produced a funny-sad account of a way of life that was already starting to seem old-fashioned by the time the boys signed the lease. Posh, British bohemians had always held salons – just think of the Bloomsbury group before the war – but by the 1940s and 1950s it no longer seemed possible to live that kind of chummy, leisured life, full of croquet, bed-hopping and chat about the latest novels. But the trio – aristocratic Eddy Sackville-West, artist Eardley Knollys and music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor – had enough money, contacts and charm to ensure that life at Long Crichel retained a wistful magic.

At times the criss-crossing of love affairs between hosts, guests and each other can become a bit complicated. Eddy loves Benjamin Britten, who dedicates some of his finest music to him but then goes off in a series of huffs. Eardley loves the Bulgarian picture-framer Mattei Radev, who is actually deeply devoted to E. M. Forster, who is old enough to be his grandfather. The writers Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann fall out because they both want to sleep with the same man.

Not all these affairs happened literally under the eves of Long Crichel. One of the challenges for Fenwick is that, while his enormous cast of characters fleetingly met up in Dorset, they had known each other for decades and in other places entirely. So the action zigzags from Ireland to New York and then back to London. Time, too, is elastic since many of these people met each other at university or in the army or even, in the case of E. M. Forster and Frances Partridge, in Bloomsbury. Fenwick is determined, too, to place Crichel and its expanding cast of characters at the centre of national affairs. Several of the principal players were involved with the UK’s National Trust’s work of saving country houses from demolition. Then there’s the fact that nearby landowner Lord Montagu of Beaulieu is sent to prison for homosexual acts in 1957, a scandal that sends a shiver of worry through the habitués of Long Crichel. Sometimes it all feels a bit strained, but this remains a rich, luscious account of a postwar Britain that often gets lost amid all the more familiar stories about new towns, motorways and the dawning of the permissive society.